Subject: djuno debate (was: RE: [lojban] Random lojban questions/annoyances.)

From: "And Rosta" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 24 Mar 2001 22:19:12 -0000

Jorge:
> la camgusmis cusku di'e
[...]
> >If y'all are going to insist that djuno makes a distinction between "to be
> >aware of the truth or factuality of" and "be convinced or certain of",
> >you're going to need to rewrite the definiton, because that is _not_
> >what the current definition says.
> 
> Actually Lojbab argued more or less what you are arguing the
> last time this was discussed. Who knows, maybe Lojban usage will
> depart from English usage in this regard and settle on your
> preferred definition.

I vaguely recall Lojbab arguing in effect for djuno = birti.

In that debate, which ran along similar lines to the current one,
the majority view, then as now, was that djuno = 'know' (and it is
a fact not controvertible by adducing sundry half-baked dictionary
'definitions', that in all dialects of English the meaning of
"know" is such that if "x knows y" is true then "y" is true).

Personally, though, then as now, I would prefer djuno not to
mean 'know'. I'd like it to mean 'believe' (specifically, for
X djuno Y to mean "X believes X knows Y") and to differ from
krici/jinvi in that if X djuno Y then Y is not necessarily true
but X believes that any right-minded person should also djuno
Y. Typically this would be because there is overwhelming 
evidence that Y, or because Y is logically entailed by axioms
or by premises already believed by everyone, and so on. This
would capture the difference between English "I know that P"
and "I believe that P": it would be "I know that P" that would
be translated by "djuno"; that is, "djuno" is the epistemological
state wrt P of someone who would say "I know that P".

Needless to say, though, with Usage deciding, the previous
paragraph is not intended as a recommendation.

--And.